If you follow audiophile reviewers, you’ll know that their stock-in trade is a very fancy way of saying absolutely nothing of quantifiable substance about the subject while sounding knowledgeable ...

As we’ve traced our no-nonsense path through the world of Hi-Fi audio, we’ve started with the listener, understood the limitations of the human ear, and thence proceeded to the loudspeaker. We’ve ...

We all know what distortion sounds like. We’ve heard it in heavy metal tunes, cheap iPod docks and the crummy speakers at Taco Bell drive-thrus. And we’ve all read distortion specs on things like ...

Your computer's multimedia experience loses a dimension when distortion overtakes your sound and makes audio content unbearable to listen to. When noise affects all of your computer's audio output, ...

A young chief engineer who knew a lot more about computers than transmitters and analog audio systems recently asked me for help in tracking down on-air distortion that had affected his mom-and-pop ...

Recently I've done a collection of measurements and tests on interconnect cables to see what I could find that would explain the sonic differences that many people, including myself, have grown ...

A critical measure for all audio components is distortion, typically specified as total harmonic distortion (THD) or total harmonic distortion + noise (THD+N). THD is defined as: ... THD+N is the rms ...

This is an excerpt from “Self on Audio,” by Douglas Self, used with permission from Newnes Publishers, a division of Elsevier. For many years I felt that the output stages of power amplifiers ...

Several readers report poor sound quality from the MacBook Pro's speakers. In particular, some readers are reporting that the right speaker outputs distorted or otherwise poor quality audio while the ...